Robin leapt forward, landing at Edwin’s side, and wrenched his arm clear of the hedge just as it writhed itself into a green wall with no gap in it at all. No way out.
Robin, breathing hard, knelt by Edwin’s side. “Are you—”
“You complete and utter idiot,” said Edwin.
Edwin looked a fright: scratched and covered in dirt, and struggling to kneel. Robin’s stomach had lurched horribly when the man in the fog mask had flung Edwin through the maze entrance. There had been something so awfully relaxed about the motion, as though he was used to moving inconvenient people, and be damned to the damage he might cause along the way.
But Edwin was alive enough to be spitting prickly insults, and to be fighting back against the equally prickly tendril of hedge that was now looped twice around his wrist. Robin grasped it a few inches from the first loop and tried to snap it, but it had the stubbornness of young things, and simply bent and wriggled. Robin would have swapped half his meagre inheritance in that moment for a good sharp penknife. He gave up on wrestling and simply used his teeth: unpleasant, but effective.
When he finally bit through the green twig, the plant punished him with a recoil that split the soft inside of his upper lip. At least the coils around Edwin’s arm were loose and dead now, easily shaken off.
Robin helped Edwin to his feet. He wasn’t expecting effusive thanks, but he’d have appreciated something more than a snappish, “You should have followed him!”
“A magician?” Robin snapped back. “What makes you think I’d have any more luck than you, against him?”
“Then you should have gone and told Mrs. Sutton. She’d have been able to get me out.”
“And I’m sure you’d have been fine in the meantime!” Robin punctuated this by swatting hard at another tendril that was making a play for Edwin’s collar. The tendril dodged with the patient, sluggish non-fear of summer midges, and crowded immediately back again.
Edwin dodged as well, a few seconds too late. He looked ashy, the bones of his face chiselled. Most of Robin’s annoyance evaporated.
“Edwin, you look ill.”
“It’s the secondary warding, I think,” said Edwin. “I felt it even at the entrance. No magicians in the maze. She did tell us.”
“You hardly threw yourself in here on purpose.”
Edwin managed to summon one of his superior-knowledge looks. “Imbuement isn’t sentience, I told you that the first—oh, blast this plant!” He stomped hurriedly on a few more tendrils, which were making a play for his ankles.
“We could try yelling,” Robin offered. “There’s gardeners around. Hoy! Help! Mayday!” He had to pause to gulp in air and energy, and to get himself in front of the next incursion of the hedge on Edwin’s space. It didn’t shy away this time. With a scratch of gravel beneath his shoes, Edwin jogged further into the maze; there was only one direction available to them, at this point.
“Maybe Mrs. Sutton will sense it anyway,” Edwin said. “You’re not a magician. The maze has no reason to hurt you. And if you’re in serious danger, it might come up against her family’s blood-pledge with the land.” He met Robin’s eyes, skittish, then glanced away. “I felt it, at Penhallick. When you were in the lake. And I’ve barely anything to feel with.”
“Doesn’t mean she’ll do anything about it,” said Robin. His instincts, when it came to Flora Sutton, were all confused. He knew her as a liar. He’d felt the edges of her ruthlessness, at odds with her faded appearance. But ruthlessness in service to a truth, to a cause, was not necessarily the same as cruelty.
There was a rustle from the direction they’d come. Robin turned back to look at where the entrance had been, and realised with an unsettling lurch that the maze seemed to stretch a lot farther than the few yards they’d moved from where the entrance had boiled closed. The path curved away and around, far enough that it was draped in shadow.
A cold wave of familiarity washed Robin’s bones. This was the vision he’d had. This sky, this maze.
And this particular sense of something moving, just out of the corner of his eye, with an awful, unseen, predatory intent that took hold of every hair in the nape of Robin’s neck and flicked it upright.
“I think we should—” said Edwin, strained, just as Robin said, “Um,” and they moved, scurrying backwards, to the end of their current green corridor and round the sharp bend of the corner. It helped a little to be out of that particular sight line. Not a lot. Robin’s neck continued to prickle.